Flight Tracker

Since our son and his family live in San Diego now, we find ourselves flying more often than ever.   Flying is not something my wife and I necessarily enjoy doing, it's just a necessary means of transportation when we're traveling 2000 miles from one end of the country to another.  "Someday" we would like to drive to California, but for now we choose to fly. For a number of reasons we usually fly Delta. 

Delta's  on  board screen  has a feature that I enjoy watching called the Flight Tracker.  There are two screens to the service. One screen is a map showing a line from the point to departure to the point of destination. The map has a small jet that's slowly moving on that line over the place of any current location. The major cities I am flying over are plotted on the map.  The other screen shows flight information including time of departure, estimated time of arrival, ground speed, outside temperature and other information. Since the tracker is always running in background, I can pause my movie or my music and refer to it at any time. Besides the fact that the tracker provides useful information, I enjoy just watching the movement of the jet, seeing what city I'm flying over and planning that future road  trip together.

Last night, somewhere over Texas, something got in my head about the tracker. All of us have a Flight Tracker on our lives.  We all have a point of departure and a point of arrival. We have a time of departure and a time of arrival.  Without being able to see our tracker, we know our point and time of departure, but we don't know our point and time of arrival. It occurred to me that our point of departure was a "terminal" (there will be an end to this) and our point of arrival is a "terminal" (the actual end to this).  In the case of the flight last night, the scheduled point of arrival was  a landing strip at the Atlanta airport, In the case of our lives, the scheduled point of arrival is, as far we are concerned,  unknown  

And I thought, if I could see my point and time of departure, would I look?  Would it help to know? Although the temptation would be great, I think that I would choose not to look.  I think I would be content in just knowing, like I already know, that those two points are out there somewhere. "For  your life is hid with God."  Colossians 3:3. The metaphor then is, as the pilot says, "to relax and enjoy the flight."  And, of course, while flying a big part of the enjoyment of the flight is the anticipated arrival, there's no need to dread it. As our twelve year old son said on a flight to Washington, D.C, "It's all part of the adventure."

Delta's history is close to my heart. Delta Airlines, one of the largest airlines in the world, began as the first commercial crop dusting operation in 1925 as the Huff-Daland Dusters in the Louisiana delta. The pilots flew the Huff-Daland Duster to eradicate the boll weevil. By then the boll weevil had already made its way to my hometown of Enterprise, Alabama. To cope with the destruction to their main crop,  local farmers were thriving on growing peanuts instead of cotton. Sessions Peanuts is still a thriving concern in Enterprise. In the middle of the city there now stands the "world-famous Boll Weevil Monument" erected to thank the boll weevil for its role in that economic windfall.  It stands as the only monument in the world erected to glorify a pest. If I was one of the civic leaders I would attach a plaque thanking George Washington Carver for his role in that process, but I have not lived in Enterprise for forty-three years and I have no say in the matter. The attached plaque  thanks the boll weevil and I choose to be content with that recognition. 

So is that history the reason we fly Delta? Not really.  As far as airlines go, Delta is as good as any and better then most. And for the first time in our married lives, we are officially "frequently flyers". In our lives, unless those who promote reincarnation are correct, none of us are frequent flyers. There's one flight. This flight has a point and time of departure and a point and time of arrival. Just like actual flying, we have limited choices for how we spend our time. Unlike flying when all of our choices are in front of our faces, our life choices, though limited, are relatively abundant. Like on the flight,  we can spend most of our time watching television, or we can get out and go places. We can do things, be things and see things. We can enjoy actual experiences instead of viewing countless hours of digital images on a screen. We can do things around town or Delta is ready when we are.